# Data discovery

An acute need in the microbiome community is to discover and integrate data in disparate data repositories to facilitate analyses. Specifically, primary data and associated contextual metadata, as well as other data products (and their provenance), exist in diverse microbiome data repositories. To make data more discoverable, iMicrobe provides a dynamic search to find data sets based on structured and curated metadata. Importantly, users can execute dynamic range-based queries to drill down to specific data sets. Data that are discovered using this approach can be added to a shopping cart and analyzed using a variety of tools.
